{"id":3452,"date":"2016-06-02T08:57:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T07:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=53977"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:22:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:22:12","slug":"the-art-of-looking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2016\/06\/02\/the-art-of-looking\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of looking"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With a frown on his forehead, medical student Jurrien Loosveld (19) peers at the work in front of him in the gallery. He\u2019s holding a clipboard with sheets of paper, ready for the analysis. How on earth can he communicate what he\u2019s seeing? His view is a mass of yellow with black and white spots. It\u2019s not an illness he has to describe. Today this second-year medical student isn\u2019t working on analysing the human body, but art. Along with thirteen other second-year medical students he\u2019s moving through the Boijmans museum for the lecture entitled The art of looking.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you all know exactly what we\u2019re going to do today?\u201d, asks curator Leonie Hulsman of the Rotterdam museum. \u201cDescribe paintings to each other\u201d, says one of the students. She nods. \u201cBut in a very unusual way. Imagine that you\u2019re looking at a painting of a snowman. You don\u2019t say that you see a snowman. But rather: \u2018I see three white spheres on top of each other, and there\u2019s an orange triangle sticking out of the top sphere.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018White, bottle-shaped\u2019<\/h3>

She points to a still-life of vases on a table. \u201cHow would you describe this?\u201d \u201cThree semi-circular shapes on a flat shape\u201d, suggests one of the students. \u201cWhite, bottle-shaped, ummm\u2026. Oh no, I\u2019m not allowed to say that last one.\u201d \u201cExactly\u201d, says Hulsman and she hands out coloured pencils, sheets of white paper and floor plans. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this because it teaches you really well that not everyone understands exactly what you say and mean\u201d, says lecturer Lex Linsen, head of the general medical practice student teaching department, who conceived the lecture series.<\/p>\n

With all their materials and the final instructions, the students set off. Jurrien Loosveld joins Monique Devillers (20) and Casper Slachmuylders (19) in search of their first painting. Loosveld will be the first to describe a work entitled Zachte wasbak<\/em> (soft washbasin) by Claes Oldenburg. He studies the painting. \u201cWow.\u201d He sees an abstract, round painting with a lot of yellow, white, stripes and dots. He leads his fellow students into the room carefully, ensuring they don\u2019t see the painting.<\/p>\n

They sit on the floor with a blank sheet on their laps. \u201cThe work is circular\u201d, Loosveld begins. \u201cAnd there\u2019s a line in the middle. The right half of the circle is yellow with black dots. The lower dots are a little bigger, about the same size as the tip of your little finger. Then the dots gradually get smaller. The left-hand side also has two lines, with yellow between them. The black dots have the same pattern as the right-hand side. Then there are two white spaces left. The upper halves have black dots, going from absolutely none to thicker dots at the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reasonably successful<\/h3>

The description is reasonably accurate, because all the students in his group end up with an illustration which more or less matches the work on the wall. \u201cThe only thing we didn\u2019t know was whether the stripe had to be horizontal or vertical\u201d, notes Slachmuylders.<\/p>\n

Then it\u2019s his turn to describe the next artwork. It\u2019s a Breton seascape with angry clouds and dark rocks. He has particular difficulty in describing the rocks. \u201cIn the left-hand side, under the blue there\u2019s an irregular dark triangle which isn\u2019t exactly perpendicular on the side. They\u2019re light-brown, with large areas of grey.\u201d When his companions are eventually allowed to turn around Devillers says: \u201cI had no idea this would be a natural landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

Write it down first, then draw<\/h3>

Once all the paintings have been discussed, the group comes together again for the assignment\u2019s second part. Now they\u2019re allowed to say what they feel when viewing the paintings, including the atmosphere of a work. But they\u2019re not allowed to start drawing immediately. First they have to listen and write everything down, and only then may they draw.<\/p>\n

In the meantime Lecturer Lex Linsen heads to a work a couple of galleries further on. It\u2019s a painting by Max Beckman, of a father and mother with their child. They look extremely dejected, as if all the joy has gone out of their eyes. The painting was produced during the Second World War and is a good representation of that fearful, depressing period.<\/p>\n

Atmosphere<\/h3>

\u201cNone of the students will describe the atmosphere of the painting, you\u2019ll see\u201d, says Linsen. \u201cThey won\u2019t see that the family is almost literally pushed aside in the work, so that the painter has expressed the all-pervading repressive atmosphere of the time.\u201d And in fact he\u2019s right. The students describe only the family\u2019s clothing, and the colour of their hair, but not the way they were gazing.<\/p>\n

At the end Linsen and the students discuss how they felt about analysing the artworks. \u201cDifficult\u201d, says Loosveld. \u201cWhen you say things, the other person doesn\u2019t always get it automatically.\u201d \u201cI said the woman in the family portrait had dark hair, but she drew her as blonde,\u201d says another student. \u201cBut none of you discussed the atmosphere\u201d, Linsen points out. \u201cI didn\u2019t think the atmosphere was that important in the painting\u201d, responds one of the students. \u201cHow are you supposed to communicate the atmosphere? It\u2019s only an interpretation. When you see patients, then you know what\u2019s going on thanks to your insight into human nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking and listening well<\/h3>

Linsen doesn\u2019t agree. \u201cAtmosphere is in fact important. When you receive patients, you want to know whether they\u2019re happy or uneasy. You can only discover this by looking at them and listening. The atmosphere determines where the conversation will go. If someone has a headache you can certainly unleash an MRI on them, but that won\u2019t tell you that someone has problems at work which are the cause of the headaches. You\u2019ll only discover that by looking. And by listening well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t

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De redactie<\/h2>\n\t\t\n\t\t
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